In the first category come Goldman Sachs’ “shitty deals” during the financial crisis, which led to tighter regulation. Culpepper and Lee say US senator Carl Levin’s public excoriation of the deals, in which he claimed the bank had simultaneously sold products to clients and shorted them, jolted voters out of “dysfunctional detachment”: based on clear information, it tapped into latent negative public opinion and provoked anger. In the other category is the #ExxonKnew campaign, exposing the oil company’s knowledge that human-generated climate change was real. The scandal failed to catch fire in part because of deep partisan division: most US Democrats cared, most Republicans did not.